Hey everyone, welcome back to another presentation teardown. Today we’re gonna be analyzing
the pitch from a company called idwall.
This is pitch deck design.
Idwall was founded in 2016 by Brazillian entrepreneurs Lincoln Ando and Raphael Melo. The company
is looking to put an end to online credential frauds and security breaches. They developed
a full-stack solution that validates documents in an automated way.
Last year, idwall raised more than 2 million dollars in a Series A with this pitch deck.
The team now has over 80 people working with them and the company is one of Brazil’s
top rising startups.
Funny side note here: Lincoln was part of 500 Startups with a previous company. The
same year we were admitted to the program. Look at those young faces. We went through
the accelerator together and became friends ever since. We asked Lincoln if we could redesign
his slides and he agreed!
By the way, you can watch Lincoln present these slides at the 500 Startups Demo Day.
I’ll link his presentation on the video description, so you can see him in action.
So back to the pitch deck, let’s see what we can learn here:
This is a great presentation to analyze because it is short and simple. Lincoln covered all
14 slides in little over 2 minutes, so this is almost an elevator pitch. (You can see
how to master those in one of our latest videos by Caya).
The pitch deck is pretty well constructed for several reasons:
First, it establishes a real problem and its monetary consequences. If you have to put
your energy into one single slide, I would say invest it the problem slide. You need
to plant this idea deep inside people’s minds.
Second, validation. I’ll never get tired of saying this, but the biggest selling point
of your company are the numbers that prove your success so far and potential growth in
the future. After just a couple of months, idWall already had big companies backing them
up. And they were making more than a hundred thousand dollars in Annual Recurring Revenue.
These are the kind of numbers that get investors interested, so drop the bomb early into the
conversation.
Third, there’s very little content on each slide, which makes it easier to digest the
pitch deck. Short sentences with complementary images and icons make these slides attractive
and the ideas in them easier to understand.
I also really like how Lincoln explained the solution with a couple of key features. These
make up the wow effect and need to be carefully chosen. You don’t want to get into too many
details just yet. This is just a teaser that can be explained in depth later on.
Next, don’t you just love a short pitch? It forces people to cut the crap and get to
the point in just a few words. Two minutes, that’s it.
Bonus points for the super short recap at the end of the presentation. It reminds people
of the problem, traction, and market validation.
Finally, the closing slide is the last opportunity to drill your tagline into people’s minds.
Also, remind them who you are, and even your company’s name, since they’ll most likely
forget it by the time you finish your slides.
After reviewing the entire presentation, and watching Lincoln's video, the only thing I
thought could have improved his pitch deck was including more hints to the product itself.
He talks about a full-stack solution, a beta product, but those concepts remain a bit abstract
throughout the deck. Especially for people who might not be too familiar with those terms.
It’s always good to make things easy to imagine. Assume people don’t know anything
and take them by the hand in understanding your solution.
So jumping right into the slides, let’s see what I did to improve these slides:
The first thing I want to do is refresh these slides with idWall’s new brand identity.
Their new look and color palette are way more vibrant and polished, and I want these slides
to shine with a new light! I went ahead and created two color sets: one with a white background,
black font, and a purple highlight. And a more bold color set with a purple gradient
for the background. This second color set works better with slides that have less text
and bigger fonts. You don’t want people’s eyes to get tired with overtly saturated slides
so use them with caution and always try to alternate with a simpler combination to give
people’s eyes a rest.
The next thing I did was adding more images that made the slides look brighter. The original
pitch deck is a little dark and none of the images stood out. By using cleaner and more
modern images, we can accomplish more interesting slide compositions.
Next, I updated the interface mockups used on the features’ slides. Devices get outdated
pretty fast, so make sure you always use the latest version on your pitch deck. You can
easily find royalty-free mockups online, or, you can pay for product mockup tools like
Placeit.net
Another detail I wanted to take care of is the all-caps phrases. I see this quite a lot
on pitch decks and websites, and I keep wondering why people do this? My guess is people want
to emphasize a specific word, make it bigger and more noticeable. But all caps words and
phrases are harder to read and can make your slides look saturated. I simply used a bigger
font with some nice effects here and there, like the long shadow effect on these phrases.
This makes the phrases stand out without compromising readability.
For some reason, the team slide (or in this case, the Advisors slide), always has the
worst photos. When it should be the complete opposite! This slide needs to look super professional
and convey trust and credibility. Especially for idWall, since thay had big names backing
them up. I replaced the old photos with higher quality portraits and the result looks so
much better.
Finally, I played around with a symmetrical layout, but switched between a one, two and
three column scheme in order to keep things interesting. A little side note here: you
can always break your own layout pattern if it helps to accommodate information better.
A good example of this is the Early Adopters slide, where we used a two-column layout as
a macro grid, but then divided each of those columns into a 4 by 4 grid on the left, and
a two-row column on the right. The same goes for the Background Check slide, where the
photo and text worked better with an asymmetrical column distribution.
Once we have all of these changes in place, the result looks super sharp. We want to thank
Lincoln and the guys at idWall for letting us review and re-edit their slides. You guys
are killing it, and we wish you all the best. Obrigado!
So that’s it, guys. Hope you enjoyed today’s teardown. If there are any other presentations
you would like us to review, let me know in the comments section. I’ll drop links to
our usual three-months promo code, and remember to subscribe if you want to check more of
our content.
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next week!